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Great software is driven by a great developer experience

Driven by COVID-19, everything from digital transformation initiatives to customer expectations have accelerated. As consumers reflect on how much they have come to rely on websites and apps over the last 18 months, they have deep firsthand experience with how technology can make their lives simpler and easier. It’s now up to companies to effectively deliver on these expectations, and the foundation for that is to empower their developers, engineers, and security operators with the tools and infrastructure required to foster a quality developer experience.  Development Today: Voice of the Customer Before we get to the tools and infrastructure characteristics that best enable development teams, it’s important to recognize the significance of understanding what end users actually want and need. Otherwise, how will your teams know what to build, where, and when? Today, it is incumbent on every business to understand customer expectations, and to be able to fulfill them with a seamless a

SD Times news digest: CircleCI announces Test Insights; JetBrains TeamCity 2021.2; Aqua Security changes its Open Source Contributor License

CircleCI today announced Test Insights, the latest feature added to its Insights dashboard. With this release, users can analyze their test performance and identify opportunities for optimization. With Test Insights, CircleCI users can now save time by addressing code failures faster. In addition, Test Insights brings users new features and benefits, including  Flaky test detection to pinpoint tests with unpredictable behavior and determine which tests have the potential to pass and fail indeterminately through proactive flagging  Meaningful lookback periods to understand performance changes over time  Improved velocity with test insights by identifying the longest running and most failed tests, acting quickly to fix them, and providing feedback to the developer sooner  And the ability to make actionable improvements with insight trends  JetBrains TeamCity 2021.2 JetBrains announced TeamCity 2021.2, introducing two-factor authentication as well as a variety of updates to the i

Microsoft reenables Hot Reload in .NET SDK repo after community feedback

Last week Microsoft announced that going forward its Hot Reload feature would only be accessible through Visual Studio 2022, which upset many developers. Based on the feedback it gathered from the community, the company has decided to go back on this decision. “Our desire is to create an open and vibrant ecosystem for .NET. As is true with many companies, we are learning to balance the needs of OSS community and being a corporate sponsor for .NET. Sometimes we don’t get it right. When we don’t, the best we can do is learn from our mistakes and be better moving forward,” Scott Hunter, director of program management for .NET, wrote in a post .  RELATED CONTENT: Microsoft reveals updates on .NET Hot Reload progress in Visual Studio 2022 It has now approved a pull request that re-enables the use of Hot Reload from the .NET SDK repo. It will be available in the general availability build of the .NET 6 SDK. According to Microsoft, the reason it announced removal from the .NET SDK in

SD Times news digest: New Relic acquired CodeStream; SambaNova announces GPT-powered language model; Django 4.0 beta 1

New Relic announced the acquisition of CodeStream, creating New Relic CodeStream, an observability solution for developers that is now available to the public. New Relic CodeStream works to connect telemetry data directly to relevant code inside the IDE, allowing developers to instrument, collaborate, and debug issues with increased speed and ease.  With the acquisition of CodeStream, New Relic gained several capabilities, including  the ability to pull requests from GitHub, BitBucket, and GitLab  issue management from Jira, Trello, and other additional apps,  code discussion integrated with Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and in-editor notifications. In addition, New Relic has also been working with Microsoft in order to integrate New Relic CodeStream with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Azure, and Microsoft Teams.  SambaNova announces GPT-powered language model SambaNova announced the availability of the company’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) language m

Test management in an agile reality

Successful product testing today requires development teams to always keep in mind how each change is benefitting the business and how it is going to solve the customer’s problem.  This is according to Brijesh Deb, a test consultant at Infosys Netherlands , in the latest SD Times Live! exclusive webinar, “ Test Management in an Agile Reality .” In response to a survey on how companies are implementing a quality strategy as part of their product lifecycle today, 13% answered that they are using a dedicated lifecycle management tool — a number that needs to increase due to its importance, according to Deb.  Also, unit testing and limited regression on a daily basis came in at 17%. If more unit testing is done in the beginning, then companies will have to pay much less of a price at the end. “In many cases, we see that customers and organizations are in some kind of a journey towards more advanced Life Cycle Management and testing is a part of that. There must be some kind of a starti

Industry Experts Gary Gruver and David Farley Partner to Help Organizations Learn How to Improve Digital Transformations

 Today, Gary Gruver ( https://garygruver.com/ ), author and president of Gruver Consulting, announces the “Engineering the Digital Transformation Training and Certification” (EDT) program. EDT is a digital, self-paced training program for teaching software leaders and practitioners how to guide their own approach to continuous improvement. The goal is to help as many people as possible reduce the barriers to organizational change by making waste and inefficiencies visible.  As part of the new program, Gruver has partnered with Dave Farley, co-author of “Continuous Delivery,” to supply trainees with key software design patterns and an understanding of how to avoid common mistakes along the way. This curated, wiki-style content library is based on Farley’s breadth of knowledge and decades of experience. Join the Engineering the Digital Transformation Training and Certification Program at https://www.engineeringthedigitaltransformation.com/    The EDT training program leverages certai

Microsoft reveals updates on .NET Hot Reload progress in Visual Studio 2022

Microsoft revealed an update on its progress on the Hot Reload capabilities that will ship with Visual Studio 2022. Hot Reload allows a developer to edit code and apply those changes immediately in an already running application, without needing to restart that application to see those changes.  Currently Hot Reload is available as a preview in Visual Studio 2019, but the company expects the full experience to ship with Visual Studio 2022 when it reaches general availability in a few weeks.  Hot Reload will work with most app frameworks, according to Microsoft. This includes typical app types such as Console, Windows Forms (WinForms), WPF, UWP, WinUI 3* and most types of ASP.NET web projects (for code-behind edits) including ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and even older Web Forms projects.  Microsoft’s goal with Hot Reload is to save developers as many app restarts between edits as possible, making them more productive by reducing the time spent waiting for apps to rebuild, restart, re-navig

SD Times news digest: CodeStream 12.0; PyTorch 1.10; Google updates Play Store fees for developers

CodeStream announced the release of CodeStream 12.0, bringing observability capabilities into the IDE. Bringing observability into the software development life cycle will enable developers to spend more time building better software and delivering quality digital experiences.  With CodeStream 12.0, operations and development teams can identify application owners quickly and work together to remedy critical errors. With one click, developers can move from Errors Inbox in New Relic One to their IDE and navigate through the stack trace for code-level debugging of high impact errors. In addition, developers can discover, view, filter, and update the status of open issues all centralized in their IDE. For more information, visit here . PyTorch 1.10 The PyTorch team announced the release of PyTorch 1.10. The release is composed of over 3,400 commits since 1.9, made by 426 contributors. The main focus of PyTorch 1.10 is on improving training and performance of PyTorch and developer usab

SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Windows App SDK

Last year at Microsoft Build, Microsoft announced its vision for Project Reunion, a set of libraries for building apps that work across different Windows 10 versions and devices.  That project has since been rebranded as Windows App SDK, but the core vision remains the same.  Developers can use Windows App SDK to create apps that have a modern UI, access modern platform features like localization and power status, and are backwards compatible down to the Windows 10 October 2018 update (version 1809). All of this can be achieved without the need to rewrite your application from scratch. To make use of the SDK, developers can use their current installer and add only what is needed on top while leaving the rest of the app as-is. It works with Win32, WinForms, and other Microsoft apps.  Although it was initially intended to unify applications across different Windows 10 versions, the open source project has expanded with the introduction of Windows 11. Developers can use Windows App

Android team reveals several new security updates and initiatives

The Android development team today shared a number of new features and updates that are designed to help users balance their needs and achieve mobility goals with Android Enterprise. A few notable highlights include the launch of the first Android Enterprise Vulnerability Rewards Program, embracing the use of Custom Tabs for developers to integrate authentication into their apps, the introduction of the Android Management API that will ensure that customers receive the fastest delivery of enterprise features, and the availability of work profile to unmanaged users with a business identity. With the release of Android 12, the company is introducing more security features and services for enterprise customers, including improving password complexity controls. With this, it becomes easier to protect company data and disable USB signaling on company owned devices to limit USB-based attacks. In addition, Android released additional privacy-preserving security controls for the Android work

Rust 2021 includes several quality of life improvements

The Rust 2021 edition and Rust 1.56.0 stable are now available for download. Editions in Rust enable opt-in changes that have the potential to create backwards compatibility issues. According to the Rust team, this 2021 edition of the language is small, but includes some quality of life changes. New changes in the latest version include: Closures can now capture individual named field instead of having to capture the whole identified The IntoIterator for arrays can now iterate over items based on value instead of reference Or patterns in macro-rules match top level A|B Cargo feature resolver version 2 is now default TryInto, TryFrom, and FromIterator are now in scope by default Panic macros now expect format strings Syntax is being reserved for ident#, ident“…”, and ident‘…’ Code that triggers bare_trait_objects and ellipsis_inclusive_range_patterns will now give an error  “Rust’s 2021 edition is a small but significant evolution in the language,” said Armin Ronacher, dire

Sentry’s FOSS Fund 155 to financially support open source community

Sentry, in an attempt to raise the bar for how companies interact financially with the open source community, is launching FOSS Fund 155 and donating $154,999.89 to 108 individuals.  The inspiration comes from other open source funds that came before it, including FOSS Fund Adopters , launched by Indeed, which resulted in a $10,000 to Sentry itself, which is an open source company. When Sentry received the investment, it committed to increasing its own financial giving to the open source community. According to the company, the specific donation amount was carefully calculated. Tech companies receive an average of $2,000 of value per staff engineer from volunteer labor from the open source community. Since Sentry employs 75 engineers, it multiplied 75 by $2,000 to come up with $150,000 as a target budget. The excess is money to meet membership fee thresholds and currency conversions.  “All tech companies stand on the shoulders of community-supported open source giants, and Sentry i

SD Times news digest: AWS Panorama generally available; Windows Terminal Preview 1.12; IBM commits to upskilling 30 million people for technical roles by 2030

Amazon recently announced that AWS Panorama Appliance is now generally available. The AWS Panorama Appliance is a computer vision appliance designed to be deployed on the user’s specific network in order to analyze images provided by an on-premises camera. AWS Panorama works as a machine learning appliance and software development kit (SDK) that enables developers to bring computer vision to on-premises cameras to make predictions locally with high accuracy and low latency. With this appliance, users can automate tasks that have traditionally required human inspection to improve visibility into potential issues. With the AWS Panorama Appliance, users can evaluate manufacturing quality, identify bottlenecks in industrial processes, and monitor workplace security even in environments with little or no internet connectivity.  Windows Terminal Preview 1.12 Microsoft announced the release of Windows Terminal Preview, bringing several new features with it. These features include a defaul

Progress released new troubleshooting solution, Fiddler Jam

Progress today announced the general availability of Progress Telerik Fiddler Jam, designed to provide users with a troubleshooting solution for support and development teams to address customer issues remotely.  With this release, new features have become available, such as the option for video recording, capturing events during a session recording, and masking sensitive data. Progress Telerik Fiddler Jam works to provide support teams with a secure and streamlined process to resolve issues remotely without requesting extra information or a reliance on additional tooling. The product allows non-technical end users to isolate issues by capturing HTTP(S) network logs, network activity, console logs, and screenshots within the customer’s own environment and then sharing them with support and development teams. The highlights of this release include The ability to record video of the end user’s browser tab while capturing a session which will be stored securely and easily accessible

One week later, afterglow of Shatner’s space flight remains

Half a century ago, we as humans made our way to the moon for the first time. For those who were alive at the time, it’s likely a moment deeply ingrained in their memory, and inspired generations of kids to want to grow up and become astronauts.  Another figure who inspired such career aspirations is the fictional Captain James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise, and last week, the man who originated the iconic “Star Trek” role made his way into space for the first time — becoming the oldest person to travel into space at 90 years old.  With so many of the country’s richest people creating their own competing spaceflight companies, traveling to space is not so much a fantasy only to be achieved by the smartest minds, but a vacation possibility for everyday people in the not-too-distant future.  Blue Origin, the spaceflight company started by Jeff Bezos, made its first mission into space in July, and last week it made another trip into space, carrying Captain Kirk himself, Willia